Be Offended. Be Very Offended

I thought I’d heard it all, but politics is like baseball. If you think you’ve seen everything, just watch it a little bit…you’ll see something you’ve never seen before. In this presidential campaign season, we have been subjected to stories of candidates being linked, rightly or wrongly, with supporters, prior acquaintances and of course religious affiliations. For John McCain, this one takes the cake.

We have known that Senator McCain sought the endorsement and public acknowledgement of the Reverend John Hagee, the evangelist and Christian pastor from Texas with an apparent following of 17,000. McCain has been forced to deal with controversial and hateful pronouncements by Hagee when comments of Hagee’s have been made public, things like calling the Catholic religion “the great whore” and announcing that New Orleans deserved God’s wrath of Hurricane Katrina because it had planned a Gay Pride Parade.

The latest comments to come out about Pastor Hagee are so offensive that one must just shake one’s head in their enormity. Last year, during a sermon citing a passage in the bible, which is as open to interpretation as any other, Hagee preached that the passage’s meaning was that God gave the world Adolph Hitler for the purpose of forcing Jews to Israel. The ultimate irony of this statement is that Hagee has also determined that when Armageddon comes, which is apparently the belief of many evangelicals around this country, the result will be the destruction of the State of Israel, obviously meaning the incineration of the Jews that live there. This is one of many links to peruse for further information. http://blackstarnews.com/?c=135&a=4509.

One cannot help but realize that there is a similarity in this story and the Reverend Wright issue, which has plagued Barack Obama for the last couple of months. The obvious difference is that Barack did not seek his pastor’s public endorsement, nor did he appear at an event for the purpose of pronouncing to anyone who would listen that this is his guy. John McCain, who seems to have difficulty defining himself and his religious affiliation, obviously wishes to raise his stature and notoriety with this country’s millions of evangelicals.

The sad truth is that McCain most likely did not realize the depth of this pastor’s avowed hatred and outrageously unacceptable comments spanning many years, but his lackadaisical and haphazard separation of himself from Hagee’s previous remarks without repudiating the man has been not only surprising, but tells us a lot about John McCain. These latest comments coming to light now demand that McCain tell Americans in no uncertain terms that he is disgusted by these comments and no longer seeks the endorsement of such an out of touch man so full of hatred for others not like himself and his followers.

Anything less than a full denunciation of Reverend Hagee will demonstrate for all of us, Jews, Christians and any fair-minded American, that McCain is more interested in attracting voters that follow this pastor than he is concerned with offending millions of American Jews and decent minded people all over this world.